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The Asterisk Club: Kerouac and Friends Join Canseco and McGwire

Canseco's Cantos

The airwaves and broadband corridors are awash with commentary on Jose Canseco's recent new book about the use of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing drugs in baseball and athletics. Commentors are outraged, indignant, hurt, cynical and contemplative over the obliteration of their fantasies about sports, athletes, and fair play.

The intellectual crowd sits back, nodding their heads with the "I told you so," smugness of those who would not strain through a single sit-up -- let alone grow hair on their backs -- to enhance their athletic prowess or success. It's SO middle class.

Yet the entire overblown controversy represents nothing more than is seen in the every day, mundane world, as well as in the highest echelons of art, science, and literature. Performance enhancement through drugs? Can I let you in on a dirty secret? It's done in every discipline, by the famous and not so famous, by the successful and not so successful. It is a practice without which many great accomplishments -- far afield from the baseball diamond -- would never have been achieved.

Hit the Road, Jack Flash

NPR broadcast a spot about Jack Kerouac's On The Road yesterday. Kerouac typed this vaunted and much admired novel continuously and furiously -- using single spacing -- on a 120 foot long scroll of tracing paper, "fueled by coffee and Benzedrine."

Benzedrine, or "Bennies", are amphetemines -- "uppers"-- made famous in the old Blues song:

Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?

In the record books of the literratti, Jack Kerouac is forever admired--enshrined in the literary equiavlent of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Yet he was a renowned drinker (etoh = alcohol = drug) and used amphetamines to power his imagination and stamina, in a behavior analogous to Mark McGwire chewing on Androstenedione in the locker room. Should On the Road be marked by an asterisk in the Pantheon of literature? How about a double dagger?

Here, There, and Everywhere

We'd be putting lots of asterisks in all our books if we tried to single out all those succcessful and well known people who were suspected (or admitted) performance enhancer users.

Samuel Coleridge, for example, admitted that his famous work "Kubla Khan," recounted a dream he had while stoned on opium.

Marcus Boon, in his book The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs lists a few of the many certified drug users in the great literary past of our collective cultures.

Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, and de Quincey, Boon tells us, used opium. Proust, Guy de Maupassant and William James abused anesthetics like either and nitrous oxide. Balzac, Coleridge, Rimbaud, Yeats and the Beats all smoked, ate and drank cannabis. Balzac's frenetic writing was fueled by vast quantities of caffeine; Leary, de Kooning, Bowles, Thompson and, most famously, William S. Burroughs, all consumed psychedelics not limited to peyote, mescaline, and acid.

These artists used drugs to feed and maintain their hungry muses. As Hunter Thompson said:

A cap of good acid (LSD) costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums.

In admitting that artistic inspiration and performance was enhanced by drug use, Salon mused:

Can drugs help you tap into a "deeper understanding" that permanently enhances your perception of the world around you? That is the crucial question, and for that we have no research-driven answer. But many artists would say yes...Drugs create unusual perceptions, and artists frequently exploit drug experiences, as they do other parts of their lives, in creating art.

But in a disclaimer identical to those who try to make sense of drug use in athletics, Salon peddles the identical palaver:

Will hallucinogens or similar drugs make a normal person the next Ernest Hemingway? We think not.

In other words, Androgens won't make you a Barry Bonds, but they will make Barry Bonds a Babe Ruth!

Let Him Who is Without Sin Swallow the First Caplet

Let us not forget the famous and brilliant accused of enhancing their performances. Here are some photographs. Can you name each famous "achiever" and their drug of choice (left to right; answers at the end of the post)?

Truth is, many people are like Goethe's Faust and Joe Boyd in Damn Yankees -- willing to make a deal with an unquantifiable risk, to chance greatness. The difference, however, is between the devil and...the deep blue sea of drug regulation.

Our society does not want us to use drugs/ phatmaceuticals/ performance enhancers to do better and greater things. Drugs are reserved for...well, for getting better when you are NOT well. They are not for being well BETTER.

If the proper research is allowed, and free market systems are freed to act, then performance enhancing drugs will come under proper research, investigation and regulation.The risks will become quantifiabble, at which point we can make rational choices. Is it worth the possibility of infarcting a bone to grow six more inches? Is it worth developing cancer of the brain to have bigger frontal lobes?

Until we answer the question: what are the risks, we can never say what the deal is worth. But as attested to by the innumerable artists, scientists and athletes (and we have not even glimpsed the SURFACE of the iceberg of this pheomenon -- now and throughout history) it may be worth a lot, to individuals, to achievements in science and art, and to the recordbooks -- yeah, even in baseball.

I don't know about you, but if I could have endless energy and pricked up attention 22 hours a day -- and the risk were, say...heartburn...I'd take the drug in a second.

If pharmacological enhancement could make Jack Kerouac a writer of historical proportions -- praised and hailed as a great artist whose name will live on forever -- imagine what it could do for you?

Comments

The famous mathematician Paul Edros had this relationship with stimulants:

"He once famously said "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and he drank plenty of it. After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, who bet him $500 that he could not stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained that mathematics had been set back for a month. He complained, "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." The bet won, he promptly resumed his habit."

I find this topic to be infinitely interesting... We must have a government that is rational in their approach to drugs (rather than this ludicrous "war on drugs") before we can truly test the boundaries and find out what stakes we are playing by.

Think of all the questions we haven't asked yet because we don't know enough to ask them. We are peering into space, clueless in many ways.

Edna St. Vincent Millay had a very well-documented addiction to morphine, among other problems.
Not to be annoying, but I just have to correct that quote... "My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night. But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-- It gives a lovely light!"

That fragmentary poem became something of a rallying cry for an entire generation of women- These women were self-billed as liberated, intelligent and free-- Yet a good portion of them ended their freedom in the same feverish addiction which stopped Millay's pen at such an early age.

Not to shuck a compliment (in fact I copy and paste them to my personal folder to look at between the hate letters) but I don't really see my position as brave so much as logical. I just don't see how the opposite case can be made.

When I have a headache I always wait before taking an NSAID (nonsteroidal ani-inflammatory like Aleve or Motrin) because I know the risks involved when using this drug. These risks are NOT insubstantial and can, rarely, cause all kinds of problems up to death. The risks are small.

If my headache reaches a point where it interferes with my functioning, I take the Aleve; and, when my headache subsides my performance is enhanced. There are those with severe health problems that create a baseline state of debilitation and for whom remediating drugs are, by any definition, performance enhancing.

There is a drug currently available (Provigil) that promotes alertness. It is used for narcolepsy, a condition that used to be quite disabling for many people. The side effects are few and relatively mild. This drug might also help a businessman who took the red eye make a better presentation the next morning. Sleepiness is believed to be hormonally derived condition can be considered a deviation of the norm similar to a headache. Is remediating sleepiness performance enhancement?

If we allow science to progress by ceasing to villify these drugs, eventually we will have families of safe pharmaceuticals that will allow us to make choices similar to my decision when I have a headache. That only seems logical to me, and I, for one, would be the first in line for medications that enrich my life.

Darn, I wish it were as easy or as simple as your proposal of the sleepy man (why man?) on the red-eye.

Drugs are part of the human condition. We've been searching for them, and using them...no not even human. Animals of various species search for specific plants.

But then, sport. Hmmn. The pure ideal -- me and my body: what can I (and my will and my intellect) achieve? Which is elbowed out of the way by: what can I, my body, my intellect, and my pharmacologist achieve?

Oh, wait, and then there is the dollar value attached to sport: should I play today, for a jackpot, with my injured joint anesthetized (for a lifetime of later pain) or wait out the game for a bigger payoff later?

Well, what is the wisdom of some old athletes who bet and lost (like Joe Namath) or some old athletes who bet and won (I think Jose Canseco falls into that category).

If we don't allow science to look at and studyc these issues none of your wonderings will ever be answered.

I'm not saying which moral or ethical choices you should make with pharmaceuticals. I'm saying that we need to allow science to take it's course in a free and open medical society.

Let me ask you this: have you ever taken a drug to alleviate PMS? What about the first woman president (coming soon)? Let's say it's a critical day in the world of national security and nuclear war lies in the balance.

Unfortunately, the president has a debilitating case of PMS -- she cannot get out of bed. Premenstrual syndrome is a completely natural condition without long term physical sequelae.

A biomedical researcher calls up the president to tell her that he has just developed a harmless pharmaceutical that completely eradicates the symptoms of PMS thus enhancing the president's performance that day when the whole world hangs in the balance.

"The pure ideal -- me and my body: what can I (and my will and my intellect) achieve? Which is elbowed out of the way by: what can I, my body, my intellect, and my pharmacologist achieve?"

Should she take the drug, or forgo the pharmaceutical amelioration ( = enhancement) of her natural malaise?

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